Agricultural commercialisation models, agrarian dynamics and local development in Ghana

Abstract

The renewed commitment of African states to modernising agriculture has reignited longstanding debates about different models of agricultural commercialisation. Which forms of commercialisation models will reduce land dispossession and the impoverishment of smallholders, and transform smallholder agriculture and the wider economy? Of the three broad models of agriculture commercialisation in this debate – plantation, contract farming and medium-scale commercial farming – contract farming has been identified as central to the future of Africa’s commercial agriculture. This paper provides empirical evidence from Ghana on the impacts of these three models on land, labour/employment, livelihoods and local economic linkages. Our findings show that the plantation and the commercial farming areas have highly commercialised land relations, land scarcity and high land prices, compared to the outgrower area where traditional systems of accessing land still dominate, enabling families to produce their own food crops while also diversifying into wage labour and other activities. Food insecurity was highest in the plantation area followed by the commercial area, but lowest in the outgrower area. Here, semi-proletarianised seasonal workers combine self-provisioning from their own farms with wages, and this results in better livelihood outcomes than for permanent workers in plantations and commercial farms. Due to the processing units in the plantation and the outgrower models, they provided more employment. However, the casualisation of labour and gender discrimination in employment and access to land occur in all three cases. All three models generated strong economic linkages mainly because they combined attributes such as processing, provided markets for nearby farmers, induced state infrastructural development and diffused technology in competitive ways. The effects of the models on household and local development are coproduced by their interaction with pre-existing conditions and wider national economic structures.

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